The first-ever national Tea Party Convention, slated to begin Thursday at the Gaylord Opryland hotel in Nashville, has drawn numerous attacks among the conservative grassroots and seemed to falter over the past week as two of its marquee speakers, Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) pulled out.

Now, its organizers have spoken out.

"Judson and I have stayed silent in the face of intense media scrutiny and attacks by former members," Sherry Phillips, wife of the convention's chief originator, wrote in an e-mail to members Saturday. "We will stay silent no longer."

The Phillips-owned group Tea Party Nation, which is organizing the event, sent a note
to supporters on Saturday, hitting back at criticisms and addressing reasons
why various sponsors have dropped affiliations, why the lawmakers won't
be speaking, why former members have been banned, its relationship with
a business loan originator and a for-profit former sponsor, and its
PayPal account.

And they say they are not running the operation for profit: they expect to break even (maybe with a few thousand dollars left over to help run their group), they say, and that Tea Party Nation is incorporated as a C corporation but is run as a non-profit.

Bachmann and Blackburn, Phillips says, pulled out in part due to
conflicting information they received from the House ethics committee;
the American Liberty Alliance, an influential Tea Party-aligned group, pulled sponsorship due to displeasure of anonymous backers, Tea Party Nation says.

The event's keynote speaker, Sarah Palin, is still on the schedule to speak at its closing banquet Saturday night. Palin's unconfirmed speaking fee, thought to be in the vicinity of $100,000, has caused some of the controversy, as did the convention's $549 ticket prices ($349 just to see Palin). Some activists have alleged that such fees contradict the spirit of a grassroots movement.

See the full statement e-mailed by Sherry Phillips, wife of event originator Judson Phillips, below:

A message to all members of Tea Party Nation

Setting The Record Straightby Sherry Phillips

Judson and I have stayed silent in the face of intense media scrutiny and attacks by former members. As a wife and a mother, I have stood by my husband and family and stayed strong in the face of many baseless accusations and criticism. We have refrained from responding to many of the attacks that have been thrown at us from other "Tea Party" groups, in the belief we did not want to spread the divisions that are already hurting this movement even though that does not seem to be the consideration of some others involved in this movement. Because of the many TPN members' requests and encouragement, I have decided to provide comment about Tea Party Nation and the National Tea Party Convention. We will stay silent no longer. I hope my comments and the issues I deal with in this note will provide some clarity.

American Liberty Alliance - Eric Odom's American Liberty Alliance is a for profit company that takes donations. We agreed to a sponsorship exchange where ALA would be a gold sponsor of the convention and we would be a gold sponsor of the Tax Day Tea Party. Shortly after agreeing to this exchange, Eric emailed Judson and me privately saying he was supportive of us and this convention and did not want to pull out, because he thinks this convention is going to be a huge success; however, some his "influential supporters" were not happy about ALA's participation in the convention and asked Eric to withdraw.

American Majority - After stating in the beginning they wanted to co-sponsor the convention, they never answered repeated emails sent asking them for confirmation of their attendance. They did not promote the convention and did not put the convention on their calendar. In fact Ned Ryun spent 5 minutes in an interview on Fox News talking about the Tea Party movement and did not mention the convention at all. Meanwhile, another training organization contacted us asking if they could become a sponsor and if they could do a breakout session. We gladly accepted and gave them American Majority's spots. On January 6, Ned's assistant sent an email stating she was making travel arrangements for them to come and participate in the convention and asked when did we have their breakouts scheduled. I told her because of their non-response, we gave American Majority's slots to this other organization. They then requested that their logo be removed from the Convention website. We complied with their request.

Tea Party Express - This group has been very supportive of us. They intended to do a small tour, culminating in an event Saturday afternoon prior to the banquet. Because of their efforts in the Scott Brown race and their intent to go after Harry Reid in Nevada, they simply cannot make the trip. We received a very nice email from them explaining their actions and restating their invitation to join them when they kick off their next tour in March. We will be there. We fully support their endeavors as they open their next tour in Nevada this spring.

Campaign for Liberty - We actively sought out Campaign for Liberty as a sponsor of this convention. We were contacted several weeks ago by the TN Director for CFL who wanted to co-sponsor the convention and I put him in touch with our Sponsorship Chair. We have not heard anything from them since.

Former Tea Party Nation Members - Several former members were unanimously banned from our site for reasons running the gamut from antagonism to passing on confidential information. These members have been blogging, as well as discussing their association with liberal media outlets and conspiring with each other to, "Take TPN and this convention down".

In one of their more egregious statements a former member wrote that Judson stated, "I want to make a million dollars from this movement." Judson has never made this statement. He has stated on numerous occasions that he would like TPN to have a million members all fighting for the cause of conservatism!

Bill Hemrick - Mr. Hemrick made a business loan to Tea Party Nation at a commercial interest rate. This loan has been paid back in full. That is the full extent of any relationship we have had with Mr. Hemrick.

Congressmen Bachmann and Blackburn - Both Congresswomen have large targets on their backs and are rightfully concerned about backlash they will receive from the left-leaning Democrat controlled House Ethics Committee. Because of the complexity of the Ethics Code regarding House Representatives, we have no doubt the Democrats would have found something in that code to cause them problems once the convention was over. We were also informed by Rep. Bachmann that both were being told two different things by the House Ethics Committee in regard to their participation. This of course sent up red flags to everyone involved. We do not blame either Congressman for their decision to withdraw from the convention and maintain a strong relationship with them both.

Tea Party Nation - Last February after Judson held one of the first tea parties in the country in downtown Nashville, he came up with the idea for a social networking site for conservatives. Judson and I created Tea Party Nation. We formed the corporation. We financed the corporation. We bought the domain name teapartynation.com, we purchased the servers and we pay for the monthly expenses. We are a C-Corp and do not accept donations. Tea Party Nation charges nothing to be a member and is run entirely by volunteers. Recently, we have been able to start charging for advertising on the site to help defray the costs of running the site.

As TPN has stated since its formation, we are not a non-profit. We prefer to offer free membership to conservative patriots so they may participate in the political process of restoring this nation to its founding principles without financial burdens, hardships or roadblocks to prevent their participation. Members are then able to choose their own way to spend their money without any involvement from TPN.

PayPal Account - We are using a business PayPal account for the convention. An email address is required to notify a contact when payment is received and we are using my TPN email account at sherry@teapartynation.com as that notification email address. All money in that account is transferred directly into the TPN business bank account.

We fully expect to break even during this event. We may even make a few thousand dollars to cover local operating costs of TPN. We have made the best of a tight budget and scaled back the price of attending this convention as much as we could without putting TPN into bankruptcy. The convention is sold out and we have a waiting list of over five hundred people. We never did this to make us rich or famous. Quite the contrary, we are patriots who love our country, our members and the people who are coming to Nashville to attend this great event.

For all of you who will be attending, we look forward to meeting you this upcoming week and we thank everyone for the support and patriotism in this fight against liberalism. God bless you all and I thank you for your prayers and words of encouragement.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.